Month: July 2015

I am at my breaking point, not completely, but getting really close. I have been overwhelmed by good and bad emotions, heightened, lowered; heart strings pulled various ways; head pounding with splitting weight-like pressure, and why all this? When someone leaves your life, then comes back again after 12-15 years, only to come back more demanding, more anxious, more cantankerous, more insatiably self-absorbed, more blunt and forceful of personality than the time they disappeared, it can be just as devastating to have them back, as it was devastating to lose them.

One of my children wanted nothing to do with me back 12-15 years ago. She decided to marry, have two children, then told me to f—k off, basically, and I left for good then, after this bout — the millioneth one since she was 15 years old — was the last straw I could take.

I remember how caustic she was back then, leading me to consider the possibility that she was bipolar, schitzophrenic, or even just without the ability to feel for others — she was so cutting to everyone around her, instigated fights with neighbors, was musically involved with punk or whatever, “music,” and especially with me, she was rude and dismissive. Maybe she treated me that way because I did not show offense. Maybe she thought it was normal to run your parents into the ground, and not care while stepping on their backs to get to nother place. I should have rid myself of her early on, but I loved her, and I still love her: she was my daughter. And now, after dismissing me, she is my daughter again, only more demanding and cantankerous than she was at 18, now 46 years old.

After all these years, she has had no inkling toward seeing or hearing from me, her brothers, any of us. Now, she has had an episode that has unhinged her to some degree, and now her husband — who went along with everything she and he worked against their parents together on — now, he has (in her words), exposed and turned on her, as though he had no issues, or that he has changed… who knows! We had no contact with them…

Suddenly, I am in the midst of their battle, suddenly and four children later, I am considering the possibility that these children I have met only a month ago, may be with me forever, or I may be in a custory battle for my grandchildren, of whom either of us grandparents hardly know — these children I hardly know, much less have any say in, are just as much like their parents, and will be a great challenge. From 7 years old to 19 years old, while I am in my 60s, and just now have begun to accept the hardships my husband and I have overcome, and just now have begun to enjoy my own life and accepting that I would never know those people — Just now… they have fallen into my life with a vengeance. I am perplexed, I am lost, I am overwhelmed, and I am NOW considering the possibility of suicide myself! I actually think we all are in differnt times, at different levels… Does all this sound so unusual? I don’t think so. You would have to understand the history of our family, which is why I am writing a memoir about all this.

I hope to live long enough to get it finished and published, but my hope is to see everyone left unburdened by each other’s weight; my hope is to have some “retirement” time to enjoy my life, as I could count the days of ease on my two hands…

While I would like to somehow, wisk my husband and me away from all of this dramatic blow-up, I know somehow I have to see it through. I don’t want to walk out on my daughter, who is suffering from her husband’s accusation that “you are not right in the head,” thinking to myself: how did you manage for over 20 years with her, not to have noticed before, instead of AFTER you created your own little JimJones family: cut off from the familiar world, severing all ties to families, and making some type of music together, children together, and basically a life together… and NOW you have decided she is sick in the head?? Why do you think YOU are okay?

I don’t think either of them ever were okay, and that was the attraction and their “vows of marital bliss” as soulmates was more a neurotic addiction to each other.

Suddenly, I am called in to defend my daughter’s honor, inspire my son-in-law’s motive to accept SOME of the blame, and I am now having to help with the clean-up of their consequnces for choices they alone made.

I am devastated again, and heartbroken more than EVER, for these four young human beings that have been struggling as their children for many years, especially the first and second, who I had known for a short while when she dismissed my presence, and now hardly know me, and now, have such questionable lives…

I am distraught, I am perplexed, I am inundated with too much information, but not enough history of their lives to understand why they seem to be at such extreme ends, and I am lost in a chaotic storm of “he said,” “she said,” and trying to peer over all the heads at my husband who is trying to look at me for cues as to OUR decisions that affect THEM and ultimately US…. and I just do not know what to do…

I thought is was an answer to prayer at first, until she nearly bit my head off for touching her computer, and with some strange explanation gave me a hug that felt contrived. Maybe I’m being duped just for her to get her two little ones, which she wants to have me care for while they do their thing and “visit” when needed. I never thought this would happen to me, but this seems to be a natural phenomenon these days: parents suffering their children’s consequences by raising their children’s children; parents’ own grandchildren, just when they thought they could rest before death, they are LIVING a terrible death BEFORE death… I do not understand this…